TiVo Community Forums Archives - My Tivo 'erased' the /var/hack directory?!

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My Tivo 'erased' the /var/hack directory?!
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Posted by: MikeA

All of a sudden my Tivo isn't running tivoweb anymore. It has worked fine for months, as has another Tivo I upgraded. Both units are Sony series 1 units. Both units were upgraded using Steve Jenkins' how-to-guide, with all the suggested bells and whistles (like ro and rw scripts).
Anyway, I can still do my daily updates via the internet and I can still telnet into the unit and get the bash prompt, but when I try to access the /var/hack directory it doesn't exist. When I do a df it shows that my active partition is 4, and when I try to mount 7 it says I must specify the file system (which I think means there is no partition 7 on my Tivo). I can't even do basic linux commands because the directory is missing. One thing I noticed is that there is a /hack directory and a /hack/tivoweb-tcl/ directory from which I can manually start tivoweb, but not a /var/hack or /var/hack/tivoweb-tcl directory.
Any ideas on what I can do to fix this. Is it possible to repair without remounting my drives in my PC?
Thanks
MikeA

Posted by: Zirak

If there is a problem with the /var directory, the tivo will wipe it out and rebuild it from scratch. You can restore everything using ftp. If you lost ftp, you can get it back without pulling the drive using http_get.

Posted by: mc-escher

This happened to me this weekend as well. I , like you, had been messing around
with it at the time.. I suspect that I forgot to unmount it or something foolish while
it was in my computer, and thus it got wiped.

A little tip when your Tivo is screwed up like this is to use TAB completion as a poor
man's 'ls'.

ex: # cat /<TAB><TAB>

will show for instance the things in pwd that are able to be catted

At least if you don't have your entire filesystem memorized to repair things.

Escher

Posted by: MikeA

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try to rebuild the tivoweb and linux utility stuff either with a ftp or http upload. At least I still have the telnet and internet daily call working.
Mike